Words Like Honey: Slow, Slow
“Slow” is my typical answer. “Slow, but it’s coming.” I say this truthfully; I don’t know how else a book comes but slowly. 
Slower than I’d like I would admit if I was honest. I had hoped to have a draft done by the first day of summer – June 21 – but with only 44 days between now and then, I’m not sure it will come that quickly.
I don’t want the words to burn out of my fingers like fire thrown. I want them to drip like honey. Sweet, languid, true, pure, incorruptible.
This takes time . . . it takes idle time, time when I’m not pushing the words into shape or trying to move them. It takes time for the idea to settle and grow in me. Gestation is the word I might use if I was a mother or thought I ever would be.
Instead, I think of hives where insects of winged fuzziness fly in and out each day to gather almost invisible pieces of gold. Where this gold is set to grow and change form from solid to liquid in a process I neither know nor want to. Where somehow, in the locked up frames of life, golden sweetness comes to be.
Perhaps my rib cage is the hive. The dates and names, the words and letters, each almost invisible period, a part of what will become sweet liquid carved into paper. One day. Soon.
It’s coming. Slowly. Slow.